It’s way worse than you think and way way worse than you want it to be.
Wealth Inequality in America
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It’s way worse than you think and way way worse than you want it to be.
Predicting the coming year is next to impossible. But some predictions of the coming decade and century are easy, obvious, and 99% likely to come true. I’m enjoying an early view into one of those: battery-backed solar. It is dim, drizzly, and chilly in Seattle, the opposite weather of every image you’ve ever seen for solar power. We will literally get less than six hours of daylight...
The last government antitrust breakup was AT&T back in 1984. It followed the model of Standard Oil back in 1911. Business and technology have changed a lot since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was written and passed 130 years ago, in 1890. It’s time we update what we mean by trust-like behavior and how we remedy those consequences. Note that the breakups of Standard Oil and AT&T were...
What I glossed over in Selling the first telephone is the fact that AT&T didn’t actually sell any telephones. Until the breakup of the company in 1984, telephones were rented as part of the monthly service. Renting was a choice to seemingly maximize profits. The excuse AT&T gave the government disallowing customers from owning their own phones was that AT&T was protecting their...
Back to understanding money and economics, I started reading The New Lombard Street soon after serendipitously discovering the wonderful online class, Economics of Money and Banking by Professor Perry Merhling (@PMerhling). After two or three years buried under other books on my nightstand, prodded a bit by a discussion group popping up on Reddit talking about the class, I finally finished...
Last month I attended my first conference held in a timezone from the other side of the globe. That was a one day event, and an interesting experiment in timezone travel and virtual jet lag. This month the experiment grows, as I’m attending Sankalp Global, a week-long virtual conference, with the programming running morning through afternoon in India Standard Time and East Africa Time. That...
